This essential guide to doing social research in this fast-evolving digital age explains how the digital revolution is transforming the way social scientists observe behavior, ask questions, run experiments, and engage in mass collaborations.

An acclaimed critic argues that video games are the most vital art form of our time Video games have seemingly taken over our lives. Whereas gamers once constituted a small and largely male subculture, today 67 percent of American households play video games. The average gamer is now thirty-four years old and spends eight hours each week playing -- and there is a 40 percent chance this person is a woman. In Bit by Bit, Andrew Ervin sets out to understand the explosive popularity of video games. He travels to government laboratories, junk shops, and arcades. He interviews scientists and game designers, both old and young. In charting the material and technological history of video games, from the 1950s to the present, he suggests that their appeal starts and ends with the sense of creativity they instill in gamers. As Ervin argues, games are art because they are beautiful, moving, and even political -- and because they turn players into artists themselves.

Intrepid journalist considers power's corrosion, evades execution, and walks on the wild side of war-torn Africa.

The main goal of this book is to teach fundamental programming principles to beginners using Julia, one of the fastest growing programming languages today. Julia can be classified as a "modern" language, possessing many features not available in more popular languages like C and Java. The book is organized in 10 chapters. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the programming process. It shows how to write a first Julia program and introduces some of the basic building blocks needed to write programs. Chapter 2 is all about numbers—integers, floating-point, operators, expressions—how to work with them and how to print them. Chapter 3 shows how to write programs which can make decisions. It explains how to use if and if...else statements. Chapter 4 explains the notion of ‘looping’, implemented using for and while statements. It also explains how to read data from a file and write results to a file. Chapter 5 formally treats with functions, enabling a (large) program to be broken up into smaller manageable units which work together to solve a given problem. Chapter 6 is devoted to characters and strings. In Julia, we can work with them as seamlessly as we do with numbers. Chapter 7 tackles array processing, which is significantly easier in Julia than other languages. Chapter 8 is about sorting and searching techniques. Sorting puts data in an order that can be searched more quickly/easily, and makes it more palatable for human consumption. Chapter 9 introduces structures, enabling us to group data in a form that can be manipulated more easily as a unit. Chapter 10 deals with two useful data structures—dictionaries and sets. These enable us to solve certain kinds of problems more easily and conveniently than we can without them. This book is intended for anyone who is learning programming for the first time. The presentation is based on the fact that many students (though not all) have difficulties in learning programming. To overcome this, the book uses an approach which provides clear examples, detailed explanations of very basic concepts and numerous interesting problems (not just artificial exercises whose only purpose is to illustrate some language feature).

When his father leaves to fight in World War I, Mikey joins the Central Park Knitting Bee to help knit clothing for soldiers overseas.

If Atul Gawande were funny--or Jerome Groopman were a working mother--they might sound something like Michelle Au, M.D., author of this hilarious and poignant memoir of a medical residency. Michelle Au started medical school armed only with a surfeit of idealism, a handful of old ER episodes for reference, and some vague notion about "helping people." This Won't Hurt a Bit is the story of how she grew up and became a real doctor. It's a no-holds-barred account of what a modern medical education feels like, from the grim to the ridiculous, from the heartwarming to the obscene. Unlike most medical memoirs, however, this one details the author's struggles to maintain a life outside of the hospital, in the small amount of free time she had to live it. And, after she and her husband have a baby early in both their medical residencies, Au explores the demands of being a parent with those of a physician, two all-consuming jobs in which the lives of others are very literally in her hands. Au's stories range from hilarious to heartbreaking and hit every note in between, proving more than anything that the creation of a new doctor (and a new parent) is far messier, far more uncertain, and far more gratifying than one could ever expect.

Tells the story of the development of computers, plus the men and women who shaped its history.